According to MA, the original version of the scene was like that and Sisko was trapped with the Prophets for eternity, but Avery Brooks was uncomfortable with it because he feared some in the audience would see it as a brown man abandoning his pregnant wife. When he explained his concerns to the writers, they rewrote and reshot the scene with Kasidy to include a promise to return some day. Avery Brooks may have been right that a black role model like Sisko shouldn't end the series that way while those stereotypes still exist, so I don't fault him for that, but I prefer a more ambiguous interpretation of the ending.

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I love Brooks as much as anybody (Well, as much as anybody should!) but I hate that line of reasoning. Especially as the most famous similar plotline would be the ending of Close Encounters when the decidedly non-black Richard Dreyfuss ditches his family for aliens.

Still, I don't mind it so much these days. We know that if Sisko does never return then Jake will ruin his entire life trying to get him back ala The Visitor. Which would negate the point of that episode and Jake's sacrifice in it.

I love TNG, or a lot of it anyway. Some of its earlier and later stuff is questionable, and I'd love to see you review that.

However, I've also seen it a billion times.

I bought a cheap complete series set of Farscape a while back now, on the recommendations of others here. I only made it around 14 or so episodes in before I kind of forgot about it. I'm not sure what distracted me from it as it's an amazingly quirky show. It take's a premise a bit similar to VOY's, but with far more interesting characters, and it isn't afraid to have fun with them.

I should probably start watching again, as I've stopped apparently before the show got much better, as the episodes up to where I stopped were pretty much standalone.

I'll probably do more threads in the future, but I have no definitive plan. I was thinking of maybe TNG, but people seem to want Farscape, and I'm easily pressured into doing things other people suggest. Hence my meth addiction.

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Uh oh, we might end up 'competing' again if you do Farscape , as I've plans to do another Versus thread that would include it. But, eh, that probably won't be for another year anyway. (Too... many... projects...)

Nah, Doctor Who isn't really my thing. I watched the first series of nuWho when it aired because there wasn't much else on on Saturday evenings. It was okay, but it didn't interest me enough to continue with it.

I'm always up for reading reviews of Six Feet Under or Lost myself, though I suspect mine will be a minority vote.

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Lost has potential. I used to love it, but the time travel stuff in season 5 bored me, and the ending left me a bit soured on the whole experience. As such, I have the first four seasons on DVD but haven't bothered rewatching any of it since the finale. A rewatch from that perspective might be interesting.

Also, I'm playing Far Cry 3 at the moment and that game is putting me in a bit of a Lost mood. A tropical island, smoke pillars, mysterious happenings, bears...

Uh oh, we might end up 'competing' again if you do Farscape , as I've plans to do another Versus thread that would include it. But, eh, that probably won't be for another year anyway. (Too... many... projects...)

I know that some men just wanting to watch the world burn is a common trope in genre storytelling, but did the resolution to the Pah-wraith arc really have to be so cheesy? The Pah-wraiths don't seem to have a purpose other than to be evil and want to kill everyone, and their conflict with the Prophets has no depth to it. It's a black and white tale of a race of evil supernatural beings that hate everything, and a race of friendly supernatural beings that want to stop them. When the Prophets were introduced, they were presented as a truly alien race that allowed Star Trek to explore some harder sci-fi material than normal, as well as the human ability to dwell on past suffering. It wasn't high art, but it was trying to do something more than your standard space opera. It's a pity it all descended into this madness.

Adding insult to injury, the final confrontation between Sisko and Dukat is just lame. Firstly, Sisko's reason for going to the Fire Caves is because his spidey-sense tingled. When he gets there, Dukat magics him up a little while gloating, then they both fall into a fiery cavern. So Sisko's great trial was to lunge at a guy? Couldn't the Prophets have just sent Sisko the message to burn that book 4 years ago? This is an anticlimactic, nonsensical end to a story that had a lot of potential, but which didn't develop properly.

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Completely agree. Felt like a total joke to me, especially compared to the Vorlon/Shadow conflict on B5.

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I've been thinking about the Prophet/Pah-wraith conflict, and it strikes me that there was a way to ground it in more complex moral conundrums and the show's prior mythology without altering how either side is presented. It seems to me that the Prophets and Pah-wraiths could be said to represent different aspects of the Bajoran character, symbolically at least - and I don't mean "good" and "evil". In season one, we see Kira Nerys trying to reconcile the anger and violence that the occupation forced her to adopt with her desire to live up to the peaceful ideals of the Bajoran faith. She was caught between two poles. It fits with her people's deities and the mythology surrounding them: the cool blue Prophets as the reflective, introspective insight and the pah-wraiths as the burning anger and will to destroy. During the occupation, we're told many times (by Sisko, by Winn, by Kira, by Opaka) that it was the Bajorans' faith in the Prophets that saved them (because it made them hold on to the better part of themselves, presumably). But wasn't it also their willingness to hate and rage and blow things up that saved them? Didn't liberation from Cardassia owe just as much to the burning anger at the injustice and the will to violence as to the "Prophet" side of the Bajoran soul? And yet the Bajorans reject that part of themselves, insist on only promoting the other side of things, just as the Pah-wraiths themselves have been banished from the temple. From their viewpoint, is that fair?

Why not have the Pah-wraiths be seeking acceptance for their contribution? Tie the Wormhole Aliens/Deities arc back into the original "peaceful culture turned to terrorism" arc that was so important to the show's early seasons and its portrayal of Kira and the Bajoran culture.

The Pah-wraiths could still be violent, hateful, destructive and in urgent need of being stopped, but rather than being EVIL they're seeking recognition. Bajor needed them, but then turned its back on them, and still aligns everything Prophet blue with "good" and everything Pah-wraith red with "evil" despite using both during the occupation to achieve their salvation.

Why not have the Pah-wraiths be seeking acceptance for their contribution? Tie the Wormhole Aliens/Deities arc back into the original "peaceful culture turned to terrorism" arc that was so important to the show's early seasons and its portrayal of Kira and the Bajoran culture.

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That's really interesting. I forget exactly when we first learn about the Pah-wraiths, but I recall it being relatively late in the series. If the writers had conceived of these anti-prophets from the beginning, maybe it would have turned out more like you're suggesting.

Maybe there could have been a serious schism in the Bajoran religion: there are the people who seek peace through faith in the Prophets alone (like that speech where Winn tells Kira, "we were fighting, too, but we didn't have any weapons to protect us"). And then there are the people like Kira who follow the Pah-wraith variant, which says that it's Bajor's destiny to free itself by force. That would make the already touchy subject of whether the Bajoran terrorists were acting honorably into not just a moral question, but a religious one.

That could have been cool, especially because before the Pah wraiths came along, the internal religious conflict didn't seem to be that big a deal. Were Winn's policies really all that different from Bareil's in a way that would affect everyday life for Bajorans? Would there be protests in the streets if their favorite Vedek didn't win? I don't know that DS9 really needed to focus more on Bajoran religious politics than it did, but if they wanted to go that way, it would have been a stronger choice if there were really serious consequences to who was elected Kai.

As for the statement that Bajor wouldn't have survived the occupation without the religion, I always took that to be more about the unifying power of religion, rather than the specific tenets of their faith. The Cardassians were trying to destroy their identity as a people, and the religion was the one thing they could hold onto as a unique part of their culture, and the Vedeks and Kais became the figureheads of Bajoran identity, since they didn't have an organized government.

As much as I would love to read your reviews of the last 2 seasons of Doctor Who with Matt Smith, I would love, love, love, love to hear your take on TNG Season 1. It was so incredibly blandtastic that I am already laughing, thinking of all the droll and clever things you will tease from it.

So please, TNG Season 1. After that, whether you do the rest is up to you

I'm always up for reading reviews of Six Feet Under or Lost myself, though I suspect mine will be a minority vote.

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Lost has potential. I used to love it, but the time travel stuff in season 5 bored me, and the ending left me a bit soured on the whole experience. As such, I have the first four seasons on DVD but haven't bothered rewatching any of it since the finale. A rewatch from that perspective might be interesting.

Also, I'm playing Far Cry 3 at the moment and that game is putting me in a bit of a Lost mood. A tropical island, smoke pillars, mysterious happenings, bears...

I'm waiting on the bluray release.

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Well, I think it would be awesome if you went through Lost, as I consider it one of my favorite shows. I admit I kind of enjoy the way it tends to polarize viewers as well; love it or hate it, at least you'll walk away with an opinion.

And it looks and sounds -spectacular- on Blu Ray.

I was kind of bummed when I started a SFU rewatch; I'd forgotten the show was in 4:3.

I would be happy with either Farscape or TNG. I think the latter might be interesting because in my opinion seasons 1 and 2 are underrated. There are some good ones amongst the fluff, such as The Big Goodbye, Coming of Age, Heart of Glory, Measure of a Man, and more.